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New Slavs of New York: All Bling and No Borscht

THE setting was a lavish party on Liberty Island to promote a new Russian vodka, Imperia, in the United States. All around, veterans of the New York party scene were experiencing Moscow on the Hudson in the form of free-flowing vodka, gobs of caviar and wandering gypsy musicians.

But standing at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, Natalia Vodianova, a Russian supermodel who is the face of Calvin Klein, seemed more intent on some old-fashioned American networking. And when she greeted Donna Karan with a smile and an embrace, the two quickly got down to business.

Ms. Kamalova, who looks like a Slavic cousin of Mary-Kate Olsen, studies finance at Baruch College and has almost no modeling experience. But Ms. Karan was impressed and invited her to audition for a fashion show. "She's really tiny, but she's really cute," Ms. Karan said later as she boarded a ferry back to Manhattan. "She reminded me of the first time I met Natalia a few years ago. She didn't speak English so well at the beginning, either."

Ms. Karan was not just being unusually kind to a Russian newcomer. She was picking up on a fall trend. From fashion to film, from art to sports, New York is having a Slavic moment. Fifty years ago such a notion might have elicited images of drab clothes and empty stores. But the Russia in the air today is of a more opulent post-Soviet world, peopled by entrepreneurial businessmen, ambitious socialites, emerging artists and exotic beauties.

The moment started in early September, when tennis fans at the U.S. Open became taken with a seeming horde of young female Russian players, nicknaming them the "ovas" for their similar sounding last names. Then came New York Fashion Week, with the catwalks dominated by models from Russia and Ukraine. Next the Guggenheim Museum opened "Russia!," billed as the largest collection of Slavic art to be shown outside Russia since the end of the cold war.

Meanwhile the fall clothes from Anna Sui, J. Mendel, Oscar de la Renta and other designers are heavy with Slavic accents like embroidered peasant blouses, Cossack boots and military greatcoats out of "War and Peace."

"A few years ago New York was all about Brazilian models, Brazilian music, Brazilian thong bikinis, and everyone was drinking caipirinhas," said Natalia Zimmer, a senior men's wear designer at Marc Jacobs who moved here from Ukraine in 1997. "But everybody's always looking for the next new thing, and maybe the next new thing is Russia."

THERE'S an explanation for this, at least among fashion-forward Manhattanites.

"New Yorkers love Russians because they're just like us," said Diane von Furstenberg, whose father was born in Czarist Russia. "They have so much energy and thirst and the desire to make things happen."

Russian immigrants have steeped themselves in New York's melting pot ever since the first major wave of them came to the city in the late 19th century. But never before have they seemed so visible, successful and media-savvy.

It has taken almost 15 years since the collapse of Communism for this new breed to light up New York's radar. A few are jet-set visitors who made their fortunes in Russia during the early 1990's, when the government privatized industries, making assets like oil refineries and steel mills available to a select few at fire sale prices. With their places now secure at home, they have turned to New York to buy apartments, do business, collect art and finance cultural institutions.

The visitors are cross-pollinating with the rising stars of a new generation of post-Soviet immigrants who grew up in New York, coming of age with "Seinfeld" and "The Simpsons."

But whether they are American citizens or frequent fliers here, this new wave is a far cry from the cartoon figures many New Yorkers imagine when they hear the word "Russian." They are neither insular denizens of Brighton Beach swaddled in head scarves, bull-necked mobsters in track suits, nor overdressed New Russian nouveaux riches on wild spending sprees up and down Madison Avenue.

Eugene Hütz, for example, emigrated from Ukraine with his parents in the early 90's, then formed Gogol Bordello, a gypsy punk band, in 1999. For the last five years Mr. Hütz, 33, who describes himself as a "mutt from Eastern Europe," has been the D.J. on Thursday nights at Mehanata, a Bulgarian bar in Lower Manhattan, where he is easily recognizable by his trademark handlebar mustache. Last year he landed a starring role in "Everything Is Illuminated," a new film adapted from the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, which centers on a young American's visit to Ukraine.

There are bound to be success stories like this in a metropolitan area that includes 1.5 million Russian speakers, whose median household income is the highest among ethnic groups in the city, according to Press Release Group, a research firm that specializes in the Russian-American market. And Russian immigrants have found renown in New York before, Joseph Brodsky and Mikhail Baryshnikov among them. But what is striking about the new arrivals is that unlike earlier generations, they seem to have little interest in maintaining their Russian-ness. They have become happily indistinguishable from other New Yorkers.

Take Daniel Lazar. When he moved to New York from Moldova in 1985, he started working as an apartment painter. Then he got into the jewelry business and wound up creating high-end watches for Jacob & Company, the jeweler whose showy diamond pieces are favored by rap stars.

NOW Mr. Lazar, 42, has started Tiret, a luxury watch business with a showroom on Fifth Avenue. His partner is the music mogul Damon Dash. With hip-hop clients like Bow Wow, Jermaine Dupri and Kanye West, Mr. Lazar is all bling and no borscht.

That leaves much of the Russian-moment boosterism to people like Ms. von Furstenberg. She acknowledges that she is an avatar of the Slavic trend: she recently went to Moscow to inaugurate a boutique that sells her clothes. Her fall collection, she said, was inspired by the "fragility and strength" of Russian literary heroines, qualities she also sees in some Russian models.

"Think about Natalia Vodianova, a divine girl who only a few years ago was selling fruit in some Russian market," Ms. von Furstenberg said. Now Ms. Vodianova, 23, has exclusive contracts with Calvin Klein and L'Oréal, a loft in TriBeCa, a British aristocrat husband and a charity that plans to build playschools for Russian children.

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Ms. von Furstenberg was one of the first New Yorkers to catch the Russian wave. Last year a Russian heiress named Anna Anisimova brokered a deal through her father's real estate company, Coalco, to buy Ms. von Furstenberg's office and house on West 12th Street for $23 million. Ms. Anisimova, 20, moved to New York from Moscow in 1991 with her mother, sister and grandmother. Her father, Vasily Anisimov, is a multimillionaire who made his money in aluminum. He stayed in Moscow to do business while his daughter began modeling , tasting New York's nightlife and turning herself into Manhattan's first Russian It Girl.

After her father rented the songwriter Denise Rich's house in the Hamptons for $550,000 in the summer of 2004, Ms. Anisimova began to appear in the gossip columns. Now she is a sophomore at New York University and, she said, planning "to build a real estate empire and take over the city."

"When I heard Diane was thinking about selling her property, I called her son, Alex von Furstenberg, who I knew already," Ms. Anisimova said. "I told Diane that if I bought the building, she'd have to give me free dresses. She thought I was joking. But the day we closed the deal, she let me go shopping."

Ms. Anisimova is so assimilated that the only person with whom she regularly speaks Russian is her grandmother, she said. That seems to be the norm among her immigrant generation. Unlike the "Brit pack," that group of editors and investment bankers who gather at English watering holes like Tea & Sympathy and Soho House, the Slavs of New York are not herd animals who hang out together.

"I didn't want anybody thinking that I was pretty successful for a Ukrainian, so I pretty much didn't speak Ukrainian at all for the first few years that I lived here," said Ms. Zimmer, the men's wear designer, who was an English translator in Ukraine before she married an American Peace Corps volunteer and moved to New York. "I wanted to be a successful New Yorker."

Some émigrés have become so Americanized that they publicly distance themselves from their origins, even if they are influenced by them. One is Alexandre Plokhov, the designer behind the men's wear brand Cloak. Mr. Plokhov, 38, who was born in Narofominsk, about 30 miles southwest of Moscow, has created attention-getting collections inspired by Soviet prison tattoos and by Kino, a 1980's rock band from St. Petersburg. But he declined to be interviewed for this article because, his publicist said, "he says he is a New Yorker, and he is not connected to the Russian community."

Janna Bullock, a real estate developer who grew up in St. Petersburg and moved to New York in 1990, does not consider herself part of a Russian community either. But last month she held a soiree to introduce New Yorkers to the Russian National Orchestra Wind Quintet. The group performed at a town house on East 64th Street, once occupied by The New York Observer, that Ms. Bullock's company had bought.

But immigrants aren't the only ones socializing. As they acquire apartments, invest in art and public relations, visiting Muscovites are also meeting Manhattan power brokers.

"I know a lot of successful people who are commuting -- moving their families here, but working in Moscow," said Alexandre Gertsman, the president of the International Foundation of Russian and Eastern European Art. Mr. Gertsman, who is from Dniepropetrovsk, Ukraine, moved to New York in 1992. Some Muscovites here are amassing art collections that are bigger than those of well-known American collectors, he said.

A FEW rich Russians are also becoming art patrons, seeing it as an opportunity to remake Russia's image in the West, from that of a chaotic superpower to a sophisticated repository of high culture.

The main sponsor of the Guggenheim's "Russia!" exhibition is the Vladimir Potanin Charity Fund. Mr. Potanin is a Moscow billionaire who bought Stillwater Mining Company, a palladium producer in Montana, for $255 million. He is the first Russian to sit on the Guggenheim board. His charity fund provided $2 million for the exhibition, said Larissa Zelkova, the fund's director. The week the show opened, the fund took out newspaper advertisements in the form of a crossword puzzle with the headline "Helping You to Understand Russia!"

"There's a stereotype of Russia as an unstable country, full of intrigue and criminals, and Russian bears walking down the street carrying nuclear rockets," said Leonid L. Lebedev, a member of Russia's upper house of Parliament. The oil company he founded, Sintezneftegaz, provided $500,000 for the Guggenheim show, he said.

"We thought an exhibit of Russian art masterpieces would be educational," Mr. Lebedev said. "But we also thought that if Americans got acquainted with real Russian art and the real Russian soul, they would be more comfortable doing business with Russia."

Roustam Tariko, the Russian multimillionaire who spent $3 million on the party at Liberty Island to introduce his premium vodka to New Yorkers, takes a similar view.

"We weren't just trying to introduce our vodka; we wanted to increase the status of Russia here," said Mr. Tariko, who likes to buy Nike sneakers when he comes to New York and run in Central Park. He predicted the Slavic presence would only grow. "I wouldn't be surprised if these Russian events started happening every week," he said.

He may be right, at least for the short term. This month Andre and Angela Izrailov, a brother and sister from Tadjikistan, plan to open Okeanos, a Russian-style banya and spa on East 51st Street, where they'll serve bathers Petrossian caviar. Later this fall the White Box gallery on 26th Street will open a show of contemporary Russian art organized by Marat Guelman, a Moscow art dealer.

But whether Russians are a permanent addition to the New York palette or simply the flavor of the month remains to be seen.

"The Russian moment may be temporary," Ms. Zimmer said. "It's just like fashion: sometimes everyone suddenly switches to dark colors, and then the next season, it's all about roses."

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A version of this article appears in print on October 2, 2005, on Page 9009001 of the National edition with the headline: New Slavs of New York: All Bling and No Borscht. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe